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  3. Worlds of the East India Company

This series aims to publish high-quality studies of the East India Company, drawn from across a broad chronological, geographical and thematic range. The rich history of the Company has long been of interest to those who engage in the study of Britain's commercial, imperial, maritime, and military past, but in recent years it has also attracted considerable attention from those who explore art, cultural, and social themes within an historical context. The series will thus provide a forum for scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, and for those with an interest in the history of Britain (both London and the regions), India, China, and Indonesia, as well as the seas and oceans.

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16 results in Worlds of the East India Company

Naval Resistance to Britain's Growing Power in India, 1660–1800
  • The Saffron Banner and the Tiger of Mysore
  • Philip MacDougall
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    23 February 2023
    Print publication:
    20 November 2014
  • Reveals, from a non-Eurocentric perspective, how Indian states developed and implemented maritime strategies which posed a serious threat to British naval power in the region.

The East India Company's Maritime Service, 1746-1834
  • Masters of the Eastern Seas
  • Jean Sutton
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    18 February 2023
    Print publication:
    18 November 2010
  • Describes the voyages of East India Company's ships to India and China in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, discussing the nature of trade and the involvement of the company's ships in maritime warfare.

Scottish Orientalists and India
  • The Muir Brothers, Religion, Education and Empire
  • Avril A. Powell
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    18 February 2023
    Print publication:
    21 October 2010
  • A detailed assessment of how Western thinking about India developed in the nineteenth century, focusing on the exceptionally full lives of the scholar-administrator Muir brothers.

Lascars and Indian Ocean Seafaring, 1780-1860
  • Shipboard Life, Unrest and Mutiny
  • Aaron Jaffer
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    07 May 2022
    Print publication:
    17 November 2015
  • Lascars were seamen from the Indian subcontinent and other areas of the Indian Ocean region who were employed aboard European ships from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. They experienced difficult working conditions and came from a wide variety of ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds, which created considerable scope for friction between them and their European officers.This book, based on extensive original research, examines the role of lascars employed aboard country ships, East Indiamen and other British sailing vessels. The focus is on protest in its various forms, from mild unrest to violent acts of mutiny in which lascar crews murdered officers, seized ships and then sought refuge with local rulers. It is only through descriptions of such events - found in logbooks, seafaring diaries and the East India Company's judicial records - that many aspects of lascar life at sea become visible and lascar voices can be heard. Through the study of mutiny and other forms of protest, the book provides a detailed insight into shipboard conditions amongst lascars employed during this period.

    Aaron Jaffer completed his doctorate in history at the University of Warwick.

Trade and Empire in Early Nineteenth-Century Southeast Asia
  • Gillian Maclaine and his Business Network
  • G. Roger Knight
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    17 June 2021
    Print publication:
    19 November 2015
  • This book explores European mercantile activity in Southeast Asia at a time when trade in this part of the world was being transformed and extended much more widely. Based on extensive original research including in newly discovered archives, the book reveals, through the study of one particular merchant and his extensive network, how trade in the region worked. It outlines the activities of Gillian Maclaine, a young Scottish 'adventurer' (his word) who came to the region in about 1816 and established an enduring business in Batavia (present day Jakarta), trading in cotton goods and coffee, and later in opium. It examines the multi-faceted nature of such a trading network, including the wide scope of commodity chains, the associated link between colony and colonial metropole, and the many tensions between colonial powers, in this case the Dutch and the British, and with local polities. The book demonstrates that Southeast Asian maritime trade was every bit as important to European worldwide commercial networks as the trade with India and China, which have been much more extensively studied, and it contributes to current scholarly debates about western imperialism, colonialism and the nature of empire.

    G. Roger Knight is an Associate Professor in the School of History and Politics in the University of Adelaide. He has published three previous books and numerous journal articles on the economic and social history of Southeast Asia.

Defending British India against Napoleon
  • The Foreign Policy of Governor-General Lord Minto, 1807-13
  • Amita Das
  • Edited by Aditya Das
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    11 May 2021
    Print publication:
    21 July 2016
  • Following Napoleon's defeat of Prussia in 1806 and his treaties with Russia and Persia in 1807, the French threat to Britain's position in India seemed real and strengthening. At the same time, Napoleon's economic warfare with Britain and the success of French privateers in disrupting British trade in the Indian Ocean were having a severe impact. This book, based on extensive original research, relates in detail how Lord Minto, a Cabinet-level politician who was appointed Governor-General of Bengal in 1807, steadily and successfully worked to counter the French threat. It examines how he builta series of buffer alliances with local states on the northwest frontier of India; captured the Indian Ocean islands used as bases by French privateers, notably the Ile de France, now Mauritius; and,in 1811, conquered Java, nominally Dutch but following the incorporation of the Netherlands into the French Empire, effectively French. Besides the details of Lord Minto's career and activities, thebook also provides full background information on a wide range of relevant subjects, including the governance and finances of the East India Company, the various polities of the Indian subcontinent and neighbouring regions, and the political situation in Britain and Europe.

    Amita Das completed her doctorate at the University of Oxford. Aditya Das completed his doctorate at West VirginiaUniversity.

British Art and the East India Company
  • Geoff Quilley
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 March 2021
    Print publication:
    15 May 2020
  • Examines the role of the East India Company in the production and development of British art, demonstrating how art and related forms of culture were closely tied to commerce and the rise of the commercial state.

British Traders in the East Indies, 1770–1820
  • 'At Home in the Eastern Seas'
  • W. G. Miller
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    16 September 2020
    Print publication:
    17 September 2020
  • An in-depth study of the British traders who extended British commercial activity beyond the area controlled by the East India Company.

The English East India Company's Silk Enterprise in Bengal, 1750–1850
  • Economy, Empire and Business
  • Volume 16
  • Karolina Hutková
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    31 August 2019
    Print publication:
    21 June 2019
  • This book examines the silk-processing activities of the English East India Company in Bengal.

Singapore, Chinese Migration and the Making of the British Empire, 1819–67
  • Volume 17
  • Neal Stan
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    26 June 2019
    Print publication:
    21 June 2019
  • Discusses how Britain replicated the Singapore model" - the use of imported "industrious" Chinese labour - to other parts of its empire with varying degrees of success."

British Houses in Late Mughal Delhi
  • Sylvia Shorto
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    07 July 2018
    Print publication:
    01 May 2018
  • This book explores ambivalence in the domestic building activities of a group of East India Company officials in Delhi in the fifty years following British occupation in 1803. Arguing that houses, their location and their contents directly or subliminally reveal the values and beliefs of the individuals who commissioned and lived in them, it uses houses to examine the changing ways the British manipulated power, both relating to and resisting the pre-existing spatial layout of the city. The re-use of palaces and of monumental religious structures as dwellings, as well as new houses that appeared formally classical but concealed adaptations to local ways of living, show that despite an apparent desire to maintain cultural separation, there was both complexity and contradiction in the interrelationship of the British authority and the failing Mughal polity. The book also shows how room sequencing and function demonstrate a lack of rigid distinction between the official and individual roles played by Company officials. Household objects have multiple meanings depending on their use and context. As the taste and choices made in these houses were primarily those of men, the book also contributes to our understanding of competing models of manhood in British India. SYLVIA SHORTO is an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture and Design at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon.

Provincial Society and Empire
  • The Cumbrian Counties and the East Indies, 1680–1829
  • K. J. Saville-Smith
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    18 April 2018
    Print publication:
    30 April 2018
  • Over the long eighteenth century, thousands of men and women from the English provinces lived and worked in the East Indies. Yet the provincial commitment of human, financial and social capital to ventures in the East Indies has largely been disregarded. This book challenges the widely held view that British rule in India was driven primarily by the interests of London merchants and national political elites. Based on extensive original research, including the piecing together of biographical fragments of over 400 men and women from the Cumbrian counties, setting them in their family, social, financial and cultural networks, and outlining the details of their sojourns in the East, the book portrays a provincial world heavily implicated in the East Indies. It discusses how provincial people's encounter with the East Indies was driven by the desire of middling folk and gentry to promote, sustain, and, in some cases, revive fortunes, position and influence in their own provincial milieu, and thereby demonstrates how provincial preoccupations shaped the East Indies, and how East Indies experiences shaped provincial life. Kay Saville-Smith is Director of the Centre for Research, Evaluation and Social Assessment in Wellington, New Zealand. She completed her doctorate at the University of Lancaster.

The East India Company's London Workers
  • Management of the Warehouse Labourers, 1800–1858
  • Margaret Makepeace
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    13 April 2017
    Print publication:
    21 October 2010
  • The East India Company, which was by 1800 a commercial organisation of unrivalled size and complexity managing a vast empire in Asia, also played a crucial role in the British economy, particularly in London, where the Company was the largest employer of civilian labour in the early nineteenth century, with thousands of workmen in its metropolitan warehouses. This book provides a detailed examination of the management strategies used by the Company to control its London warehouse labourers and to maintain acceptable levels of commercial and corporate efficiency. It shows how benevolence formed an integral part of the Company's domestic business practices, with discipline, punishment, regulation and restriction counterbalanced by incentives, rewards and paternalistic practices, such as fair and regular wages, pensions, a comprehensive welfare scheme, free medical treatment and an in-house savings bank. The book also outlines how, when the Charter Act of 1833 brought about the closure of the vast majority of the Company's London warehouses, the directors instigated a pioneering redundancy compensation scheme for the labourers.

    MARGARET MAKEPEACE is a Senior Archivist in the India Office Records at the British Library.

The Emergence of British Power in India, 1600-1784
  • A Grand Strategic Interpretation
  • G. J. Bryant
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 December 2013
    Print publication:
    19 October 2013
  • Empires have usually been founded by charismatic, egoistic warriors or power-hungry states and peoples, sometimes spurred on by a sense of religious mission. So how was it that the nineteenth-century British Indian Raj was so different? Arising, initially, from the militant policies and actions of a bunch of London merchants chartered as the English East India Company by Queen Elizabeth in 1600, for one hundred and fifty years they had generally pursued a peaceful and thereby profitable trade in the India, recognized by local Indian princes as mutually beneficial. Yet from the 1740s, Company men began to leave the counting house for the parade ground, fighting against the French and the Indian princes over the next forty years until they stood upon the threshold of succeeding the declining Mughul Empire as the next hegamon of India. This book roots its explanation of this phenomenon in the evidence of the words and thoughts of the major, and not-so major, players, as revealed in the rich archives of the early Raj. Public dispatches from the Company's servants in India to their masters in London contain elaborate justifications and records of debates in its councils for the policies (grand strategies) adopted to deal with the challenges created by the unstable political developments of the time. Thousands of surviving private letters between Britons in India and the homeland reveal powerful underlying currents of ambition, cupidity and jealousy and how they impacted on political manoeuvring and the development of policy at both ends. This book shows why the Company became involved in the military and political penetration of India and provides a political and military narrative of the Company's involvement in the wars with France and with several Indian powers. G. J. Bryant, who has a Ph.D. from King's College London, has written extensively on the British military experience in eighteenth-century India.

British Naval Power in the East, 1794-1805
  • The Command of Admiral Peter Rainier
  • Peter A. Ward
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 September 2013
    Print publication:
    18 July 2013
  • When war broke out with France in 1793, there immediately arose the threat of a renewed French challenge to British supremacy in India. This security problem was compounded in 1795 when the French overran the Netherlands and the extremely valuable Dutch trade routes and Dutch colonies, including the Cape of Good Hope and what is now Indonesia, fell under French control. The task of securing British interests in the East was a formidable one: the distances were huge, communication with London could take years, there were problems marshalling resources, and fine diplomatic skills were needed to keep independent rulers on the British side and to ensure full co-operation from the East India Company. The person charged with overseeing this formidable task was Admiral Peter Rainier (1741-1808), commander of the Royal Navy in the Indian Ocean and the East from 1794 to 1805. This book discusses the enormous difficulties Rainier faced. It outlines his career, explaining how he carried out his role with exceptional skill; how he succeeded in securing British interests in the East - whilst avoiding the need to fight a major battle; how he enhanced Britain's commanding position at sea; and how, additionally, in co-operation with the Governor-General, Richard Wellesley, he further advanced Britain's position in India itself. Peter Ward completed a PhD in naval history at the University of Exeter after a career in international personnel management, working for Californian high technology companies in the United States, Hong Kong and Europe.

The East India Company and Religion, 1698-1858
  • Penelope Carson
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    20 September 2012
  • This wide-ranging book charts how the East India Company grappled with religious issues in its multi-faith empire, putting them into the context of pressures exerted both in Britain and on the subcontinent, from the Company's early mercantile beginnings to the bloody end of its rule in 1858. Religion was at the heart of the East India Company's relationship with India, but the course of its religious policy has rarely been examined in any systematic way. The free exercise of religion, the policy the Company adopted in its early days in order to safeguard the security of its possessions, was challenged by Evangelicals in the late eighteenth century. They demanded that the Company should grant free access to Christians of all Protestant denominations and an end to 'barbaric' Indian religious practices. This gave rise to an unprecedented petitioning movement in 1813, comparable in strength to that for the abolition of the slave trade the following year. It was an important milestone in British domestic politics. The final years of the Company's rule were dominated by its attempts to withstand Evangelical demands in the face of growing hostility from Indians. In the end it pleased no one, and its rule came to a gory and ignominious end. In this compelling account, Penny Carson examines the twists and turns of the East India Company's policy on religious issues. The story of how the Company dealt with the fact that it was a Christian Company, trying to be equitable to the different faiths it found in India, has resonances for Britain today as it attempts to accommodate the religions of all its peoples within the Christian heritage and structure of the state. Penelope Carson is an independent scholar with a doctorate from King's College, London.